1. A picture can tell a thousand words

It may sound cliché but an image has the ability to communicate a message much faster than a paragraph of text can. A huge part of marketing is now done online and through social media, and with such a vast amount of companies now making use of these platforms strong, effective imagery is crucial to stand out from the crowd.
It is important that your imagery does two main things; firstly you want to capture the audience’s attention and get them to engage. Secondly, it must convey a message about your brand or business. It can be difficult to interlink these two attributes in just one image, which is why graphic design is vital, as it has the ability to deliver a message in the most efficient and aesthetic way.

2. A strong brand is memorable

A strong brand identity is much more than just having a logo and a website. Your brand is a representation of your company, what you do and how you want to be perceived by your target audience. This should all be communicated through the use of a colour palette, distinct tone of voice, logo, specific typeface and much more.

As well as having all the above elements, consistency is another vital part of branding and ensures that your brand will remain recognisable to your audience no matter where it is presented. The best way to guarantee brand consistency is to produce a style guide. Designers can produce a style guide best suited to your brand, including helpful guidelines on how components must be presented.

3. Stand out from the crowd

It can be difficult to stand out from the crowd with lots of other companies competing for attention in a similar market. In order to make sure your voice is heard it is important to have something that differentiates you. Whether this is locality, pricing, good customer service or something as simple as having a bold visual identity that defines you and enables your brand to stand out.

4. Create conversions

Effective Website Design is something that is vital to small businesses, and it’s a topic that we have focused on a lot recently having presented a video on the subject back in May at Search Seven’s marketing event.
From our experience we have narrowed this topic down to 3 key areas, these are:Understanding your audience: It is important that you have a strong knowledge of your audience and what they want to get out of your website, this way you can match their interests making for a better conversion rate.

Be Your User Experience: Having a strong brand identity and building your website around this, delivering immersive content that your target audience will want to engage in and ensuring that you remain authentic.

Test, Go Live and Stay Live: Using A/B testing, this is where you can use audience sampling to guide web improvements, another important point is to avoid time wasting – make your website live and update it as you go.

5. Speculate to Accumulate

Small businesses can be reluctant to invest in the creative side of their business thinking that it is unimportant and they can function with out it. However, Graphic Design shouldn’t be undervalued, if you think about any of the most successful brands such as Google, Coca Cola and Nike they all have a very strong and consistent brand identity, and make sure this is consistent throughout all of their branding campaigns.

The key to giving your brand impact and ensuring it remains recognisable to a broad audience is to guarantee that is always presented consistently.

If you would like to find out more about how Graphic Design can improve your business please contact us on 01732 743 455 or send a email to team@hanselldesign.co.uk alternatively if you would like to watch our video on Effective Website Design then click this link.

A is for Audience Research your target audience, what are their needs and how does your brand meet them? If it meets their needs consider how can you continue to keep them interested. If needs aren’t being met think how can you refocus your brand to match them more. B is for Brand Continue to analyse your […]

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Photography is one of the most powerful sources of communication; not only does it have the ability to deliver a message in an instant but it also speaks a universal language and can reach almost any audience. Therefore photography is vital tool in our creative ‘toolbox’. Effective imagery can be the make or break of […]